


You Owe Me

by come_anyway



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-24
Updated: 2012-09-24
Packaged: 2017-11-14 23:53:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,966
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/520829
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/come_anyway/pseuds/come_anyway
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometime in the month before the blog hit it big and Sherlock started taking more paid cases, John ran out of pants.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Owe Me

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the fuckyeahjohnlockfanfic Red Pants contest
> 
> Beta'd by the lovely Becky and Casey -- thanks so much, dears!

Sometime in the month before the blog hit it big and Sherlock started taking more paid cases, John ran out of pants.

Well, that’s not entirely accurate. It’s more that he got tired of doing laundry every few days in order to have clean underwear. He hadn’t brought a lot of usable clothing home from Afghanistan (the heat tended to ruin everything), and he honestly hadn’t done much of anything while living in that bedsit, aside from mandatory trips to visit Ella and watching entirely too much telly. But, now that he had a somewhat active social life, his part-time job at the clinic, and his full-time job of watching after Sherlock, he couldn’t really afford to spend that much time downstairs, doing laundry.

So, John found himself stopping at Marks & Spencer on the way home from the clinic one day, prowling through the sale section for a serviceable multipack of briefs. There were only a couple which would fit, one with a frankly _alarming_ texture and the other a three-pack of red and white cotton pants. They were nothing like he had ever bought before, having gravitated toward the simple white or grey varieties, but they were the right style, the right size, and the right price. When he had this month’s rent to worry about, he couldn’t afford to be choosy about what he was wearing under his clothes.

He bought the marked-down pants and thought nothing of it until a week later when Sherlock saw them sitting in his laundry basket.

“What are these?” he asked, plucking them out of the basket with a curious look on his face.

“Obvious, isn’t it?” John said, trying to snatch them back. Sherlock simply held them over his head and continued to peer at them, fox-like. He stretched the elastic waist between his hands.

“Oddly enough, no,” Sherlock replied. “These are decidedly not your style, John.”

“They’re not, but they were on sale and no one’s going to see them anyway, considering the luck I’ve been having. Now, give them back.”

Sherlock complied, tucking his thumb into the band and shooting them at John’s head. He managed to scoop them out of the air before they hit his face. Sherlock smirked.

John refolded the pants and set them back in the basket. “You’re not going to forget that I own these, are you?”

Sherlock let out a quick snort before moving toward the kitchen. “Doubtful.”

 

 

And John was right -- Sherlock didn’t forget about the pants. Or at least he didn’t let John forget about them, as they popped up in odd ways around the flat.

The first pair was consigned to the bin when Sherlock cut them apart to use the waistband as a ligature for one of his experiments. John walked into the kitchen to find his laundry basket on the floor by the worktop where he had left it, while the white elastic was wrapped around a cadaver leg Sherlock was messily injecting with a blue liquid. The red fabric, sheared away from the elastic, was lying forlornly on the table.

“What in the name of--”

Sherlock didn’t look up from his work, sinking a syringe anew into the leg. “It was the closest thing on hand.”

John jerked forward and pulled the knot in the elastic loose; instantly, the blue fluid began to ooze onto the worktop and drip onto the floor. Sherlock glared at him. “Was that entirely necessary?”

“Yes.”

“Well, you made the mess. You can clean it up.” With that, Sherlock abandoned his work and stalked off to his room, slamming the door behind him.

John never did manage to get those blue stains out of the lino.

 

 

John walked into the kitchen another day to find a second pair covered in permanent marker. An orange liquid was bubbling away in a pan on the hob, the microwave was counting down from two hours and thirteen minutes, and Sherlock was no where to be found. John’s pants had apparently been used as scrap notepaper.

He picked up the marker and scrawled _You owe me two pair now_ across the waistband before grabbing the rest of his laundry and going to his room upstairs. He didn’t see the pants the next time he went downstairs, and he made it a point to keep his laundry away from the kitchen. His surviving pair of red pants managed to stay out of Sherlock’s hands, and they became something rather unremarkable and uncommented upon in his underwear drawer.

 

 

And then Sherlock fell.

More accurately, he jumped, but the result was the same. John was alone again with his laptop, his handgun, and weekly therapist appointments, though this time he added the extra pain of staying in 221B after a somehow-worse week with Harry. Having quit at the clinic months ago and not being able to afford anything else (Mrs. Hudson didn’t comment on the smaller rent checks, and if she asked John to take a look at some maintenance issues which might have been better handled by professionals, he wasn’t going to complain -- it gave him something to do, after all), John stayed in their -- _his_ \-- flat, surrounded by their -- _his_ \-- things and stared at the telly a lot.

When he ventured into Sherlock’s room a month later, thinking that he should do _something_ with the man’s clothes, he found that the closet and wardrobe had been emptied, the shelves and bedside table free of books and papers. John shut the door behind him quietly as he left the room and reexamined the sitting room, now noticing that some papers were missing from the desk, along with Sherlock’s laptop and, most infuriating, his violin.

John spent ten minutes yelling at Mycroft on his cell phone, his voice echoing in the empty house. He cursed until he was hoarse and hung up without notice when he realized that he was both repeating the same phrase (“That was all I had left”) and crying into his mobile. He slumped onto the couch, curling up into the impression worn in by Sherlock’s weight over many months, and didn’t move until Mrs. Hudson ventured upstairs a few hours later with a plate of sandwiches.

 

 

Seven appointments with Ella later, John told himself to snap out of it. _Three months is long enough_ , he thought as he went online to apply for every medical job in the city. _You’re not okay, but that’s enough._

A few weeks after that, he had a job at another clinic where he was entirely overqualified for the runny noses and irritable bowels he treated on a daily basis, but he was doing something. He updated his blog, met with Lestrade for a pint on a weekly basis, and stopped flipping off every CCTV camera that turned his way. He bought Mrs. Hudson a new tea set with some of the money that came in from syndicating old blog entries to the _Times_ after Sherlock’s name was cleared by the Yard.

And when he popped into the department store a few months later to replace some of his older, worn-out clothing, he smirked when he added an entirely-too-expensive-when-not-on-sale three-pack of red pants to his basket.

 

 

It was a Thursday a year later, and John was reading in his chair, having already locked up for the night, when he heard a tap on the door.

“I’m coming, Mrs. Hudson!” he called, marking his place in his book and shuffling over to open the door. He expected to see his landlady, asking him to check on the furnace in the morning -- she’d mentioned it earlier in the day, thought it wasn’t working properly, and John had agreed to take a look at it, even though he knew nothing about heating.

He unlocked the door and said, “I’ll take a look at it before I head to the clinic in the--”

His voice faded out when he saw Sherlock leaning in the hallway. His hair was short and ginger, he was wearing a dirty white t-shirt and faded jeans, and he was thinner than ever, but he was undoubtedly, undeniably Sherlock.

“Hello, John,” Sherlock rumbled, taking a deep breath. He seemed to instantly regret that action, though, as he winced and clutched an arm around his own chest.

John surged forward, wrapping his arm protectively around his friend’s shoulders and easing him off the wall, supporting his weight as he walked him into the flat. Not stopping in the sitting room, they walked down the hall into the bathroom, where John eased Sherlock onto the closed toilet seat. In the bright fluorescent light, he noticed the cut bleeding sluggishly on Sherlock’s cheek, the rips and bootmarks on his plain white t-shirt, the finger-shaped bruises on his neck.

“Jesus, Sherlock,” he breathed, gently cupping his uninjured cheek before rubbing his hand through the man’s shorn and dyed hair. He took another breath before he met Sherlock’s eyes, always changing and yet unchanged after all this time. Right now, they were a startling blue tinged with grey, like a London morning.

“Where’s the worst of it?”

Sherlock blinked slowly and then moved to lift his shirt over his head, unclenching his fist from around John’s hip. John hadn’t even noticed that he had been holding on, though now that Sherlock’s fingers were gone, the loss of pressure was terrible.

John helped Sherlock lift the shirt over his head and gasped at the livid marks littered over his friend’s chest and stomach. There were three clear bootmarks which corresponded with those on the front of his shirt. John urged Sherlock to turn in his seat and saw where two more marks stood out on his pale back. One dipped almost completely below the waist of Sherlock’s jeans.

“I need you to take off your trousers so I can see,” John murmured, resting his hand on the unblemished skin of Sherlock’s shoulder. “Then I can figure out what to do with you.”

Sherlock nodded and slowly stood up, grasping John’s hips, and then his arms, for support. He unbuttoned the jeans which immediately fell down his narrow hips, pooling on the linoleum. His legs were littered with more bruises and scrapes, but John didn’t immediately examine those injuries. Instead, he was looking at Sherlock’s pants.

Red pants. Red pants covered in permanent marker, faded now into an illegible, many-times-washed blur but for the black ink on the elastic waist: _You owe me two pair now._

Staring at the inked words, John said, “I thought you--”

“No, I--” Sherlock croaked. He cleared his throat and started again. “No, I... I never threw them out. And then Mycroft brought me my clothes and I... kept them.”

John looked up into Sherlock’s eyes, his hands resting on Sherlock’s hips as Sherlock’s own hands gripped John’s biceps. He moved his right hand to cup Sherlock’s face again, and this time Sherlock leaned into his palm and shut his eyes. John stroked his thumb over Sherlock’s cheekbone, feeling the edges of a scar on his temple with his other fingers. He stood on tiptoe and kissed Sherlock’s forehead, letting his lips linger before settling back on his heels. Sherlock’s eyes fluttered back open.

They smiled at each other.

John motioned for Sherlock to sit on the toilet seat again, and he turned around to retrieve his medical bag from under the sink. He began to pull supplies out of the bag, and as he dabbed at the cut on Sherlock’s cheek, he caught his gaze again. “You still need to buy me some new pants.”

Sherlock laughed and then looked startled as the sound came out of his mouth. His eyes crinkled around the edges, and he turned his head to kiss John’s hand, still holding the bloody gauze.

They were going to be all right.


End file.
